Functors extending the Kauffman Bracket

Seminar: 
Geometry & Topology
Event time: 
Thursday, December 7, 2006 - 11:30am to Wednesday, December 6, 2006 - 7:00pm
Location: 
431 DL
Speaker: 
John Armstrong
Speaker affiliation: 
Yale
Event description: 

We consider the problem of defining a monoidal functor on the
category of framed tangles whose restriction to links is an
evaluation of the Kauffman bracket. We show that a very large class
of such functors correspond to bilinear forms with certain asymetry
properties. This gives us an insight into why categorifications of
the Bracket work they way they do.